According to The Journal of Communication , the average employee spends 50-80% of their workday communicating. With companies relying on remote working - either temporarily or because they're planning on downsizing their office - effective communication is paramount.
Read on to discover how you can fine-tune your corporate communication (and what exactly this means); to boost your colleagues’ wellbeing, declutter your inbox, and humanise everything - even at a distance.
What do we mean by Corporate communication?
Northeastern University defines it as:
‘[T]he way in which businesses and organizations communicate with internal and external various audiences.’
For our purposes, we’re going to focus on fine-tuning your internal corporate communication. Most likely, communicating with your team will incorporate many forms ranging from informal videoconferencing catch-ups to formal reports and anything in between.
The way you communicate matters.
Leading publisher for Corporate Communications, Ragan Communications revealed that the way employees are engaged statistically correlates with their engagement at work. In other words: communication is essential to your business and employees' success.
Three important reasons why you should fine-tune internal corporate communication
1. Curating a sociable workplace boosts employee engagement.
Gallup’s 2020 Research emphasized the importance of Leadership communication and the employee’s voice when it comes to feeling engaged. In a recent study, Gallup found a direct correlation between those organisations that scored highly in employee engagement and operational profitability. The top scorers in the former field reported higher rates in sales and profitability of 20-21%.
How can I boost sociability without the aid of an office?
Where office layouts such as Activity Based Workplace solutions play a key role in engaging your workforce, businesses must offer workarounds in their absence whilst teams are working remotely. This can be a challenge when you don’t have your best work pal in arm’s reach, but by no means impossible.
Actively ensure that your company:
- Employ a top-down attitude to encourage chitchat.
Senior management should work to facilitate the water cooler moments we’re all missing in the physical workspace. Here at Flexioffices, for instance, management ask the team to share a fun fact or their most exciting interaction of the week regularly. Taking initiative as basic as this is a sure way to encourage an atmosphere where work and chit-chat can happily tesselate.
- Facilitate light-hearted discussion without vast amounts of information.
A specific chat/messaging service such as Slack can help to reduce the overlay of chitchat on those longer larger detail-oriented meetings, too.
2. Decluttering the desktop will increase employee productivity.
According to Technology Evaluation Centre IDC, 2.5 hours of the working day are lost to employees searching for relevant information.
Cut the clutter by:
- Setting those spam filters.
Split your inbox in folders and stay on top of this! Non-essential business emails, updates, and a billion newsletters will get lost and overlooked after a year of remote-working. File it or get rid.
- Ask yourself if every task calls for a meeting.
BBC Worklife recently published an article explaining the new concept of ‘Zoom fatigue.’ We’re not saying scrap videoconferencing - quite the opposite. Just streamline it for as and when it counts. Marissa Shuffler, associate professor at Clemson University of workplace wellbeing and teamwork effectiveness, told the BBC that ‘shared files with clear notes can be a better option to avoid information overload.’
- Give updates in a digestible and technologically safe way.
Pre-record important information so employees can listen and digest the information in their own time.
- Tabulate communication apps.
Where possible, reduce the number of platforms your employees are monitoring. If clear communication channels are established, people needn’t make breakaway chats.
3. Humanising everything will reduce your employee turnover.
Co-working for one isn’t so fun. There’s no antidote for what a physical workspace with real people grants you, but businesses who communicate effectively are 50% more likely to have low employee turnover rates. Personalizing your internal corporate communication will make uber relevant what information you are giving to whom, resulting in more engaged and valued employees no matter where they are.
Humanise your communications by:
- Checking in with your team on a personal level.
In Harvard Business Review, 46% of remote employees said that the most effective managers checked in with them regularly.
- Recognise achievements.
There are a plethora of platforms - such as perkbox - that allows you to recognise your team for their hard work and milestone achievements.
- Reinforce your company values. Where co-working spaces are ready-made to emanate your company culture, a wider company perspective is harder to see when you’re not in the office together. Practise what your company is preaching in your roundups to ensure people feel they are serving a purpose and still contributing to a company-wide goal and objective.
The main takeaways:
- Employ effective communication from the top-down: ensure all managers are taking initiative to engage employees on a personal and compassionate level no matter what form of communication you’re opting for.
- Keep information and the way its distributed streamlined to boost productivity. Information should be exchanged on a need to know basis.
- Communication is paramount to your business - and employees - success. The two go hand in hand.
Internal communication matters even more so from a distance. Even if you don’t plan on working remotely full time on a permanent basis, (and you’re not alone), implementing the above strategies will help you overcome this unprecedented chapter we’re all trying our best to work through.
The good news?
The vaccines are here and there's light at the end of the tunnel. When you're ready to get back to working with your colleagues in the flesh, we can help.
